Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar
of Holocaust
Studies,
The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

Now Professor Emerita and Independent Scholar

Every
rape is a grave violation of physical and mental integrity. Every rape has
the potential to profoundly debilitate, to render the woman homeless in her
own body and destroy her sense of security in the world. Every rape is an
expression of male domination and misogyny, a vehicle of terrorizing and
subordinating women. Like torture, rape takes many forms, occurs in many
contexts, and has different repercussions for different victims. Every rape
is multidimensional, but not incomparable.

Rhonda
Copelon, “Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes Against Women in Time
of War”

“I was raped,” she said matter of
factly. In the fourth hour of our interview, Marie S., a young French woman
whose entire family of six siblings and both parents was murdered, simply
and quietly, said that she was raped by a Wehrmacht soldier. After two years
of hard labor and several months in Block 25, Marie had been assigned to
Birkenau’s Kanada commando, when it had been expanded in the spring of 1944,
to “handle” the belongings of the Hungarian Jews. This older soldier, as she
described him, had been on his way back from the Russian front and had
stopped off in Auschwitz for a few days. He had been watching Marie, who was
nineteen at the time, and sometimes followed her. One day in September, her
friends warned her that he was after her, so she fled to her bunk, where he
caught her and raped her.

Marie had been a virgin, innocent,
modest, protected before she was picked up and deported to
Auschwitz-Birkenau. She had “never even kissed a boy…never saw my father
undressed.” This rape was her first encounter with sex, but obviously not
her first encounter with violence. “It was the deepest defilement,” she said
and one of her loneliest moments. Her friends told her to get washed and
forget it. She had been resilient enough to recover from all the other
physical debasements because she had experienced them collectively, as part
of a group that had suffered the same humiliations. She suffered the rape
alone and was traumatized for decades. Yet, it was not the most
horrific Nazi violation she endured, not nearly as horrific as the murder of
her large family (Interview November 1996).

Like many other women, Jews and
non-Jews, Helen L. feared liberation because of the Russian soldiers who,

the
minute they saw a female, whether you were young or old, whether you were 8,
80, 18, or 28, they didn’t care. They raped you whether you were pretty,
ugly, fat, skinny, it didn’t matter. It was a female. And so with us [Helen
and her sister Toby] it was a matter of, can we outsmart them in that
department. Our survival as far as eating or sleeping was almost secondary.

Helen and her older sister Toby
were Hungarian women who were deported to Lodz and then to Auschwitz,
Stuthof, and a succession of labor camps until they were forced to join a
Death March. Totally exhausted after a few weeks on the March, they chose
to die by lying in the snow where they expected to fall asleep and
subsequently freeze to death. They assumed that such a death would be easy.
But they were soon found by Nazi soldiers and concocted a story about being
good Nazi children who had been orphaned by the advancing Russian Army. They
were then invited to join the soldiers as washerwomen. Apparently, each
battalion was allowed two washerwomen. As such, Helen and Toby were
protected and never assaulted. During a Russian advance, they ran from the
Nazis to the Russian soldiers who, of course, wanted to sleep with them.
Somehow they talked their way out of it (Holocaust Oral History Project, 13
February 1989). Other women tell harrowing stories of trying to escape
rape by the Russians who had liberated their areas or camps: “the Russians
were animals. They were wild animals and we were afraid of them. We put
chairs and tables against our doors not to be invaded by them. They [had]
invaded the barracks the night before…(Gurewitsch 97).

Born in Bialystock and deported to
Majdanek and later to Blishjen, a work camp, Helen Schwartz needed shoes:

The man
who usually made shoes for us would not give any to me unless I would have
intercourse with him. At Blishjen, if a man had extra food, he would ask
girl for sexual pleasures and pay her in food. This was common, but not for
me. This shoemaker could not understand that I wanted only shoes and nothing
more. …Some of the girls were so desperate that they used their body to pay
for the bare necessities that they needed. (Schwartz III and IV)

Sex for survival or bartered sex
was not uncommon: the practice was “linked to networks of power” and a
strategy “to improve…material circumstances” (Hutton 107). A male survivor
of the Lodz ghetto reported on prostitution for a piece of bread: “for a
slice of bread they [young girls] would go into a yard or somewhere.
Possibly the mother was working, so the daughter would use the opportunity”
(Niewyk 304-05). Nehama Tec, in non-judgmental language and tone, describes
the sexual expectations of male partisans in return for protection. She
further corroborates the assertion that women’s responses to “sexual
advances were motivated by the promise of food” (Tec305-335, 146).
Undoubtedly, bartering sex for food was a life saving though degrading
tactic.

These vignettes speak to the
larger issue of sex in the service of violence and survival during the
Holocaust. Sexual coercion, whether in the form of rape or bartered sex, was
one more humiliation, one more degradation, one more indignity that many
Jewish women experienced. Traumatic and horrible, to be sure, but not on the
same scale as the horrors of the murder of their families and friends.

Although we have little
documentation about rape, forced sexual slavery, sex for survival/ bartering
for food or other necessities from which to draw conclusions, we do have
isolated reports. For example, Vera Laska observed that rape and forced
prostitution of Jewish women in camp brothels were rare because, if caught,
the SS would risk severe punishment or transfer to the Russian front. “Most
SS,” she said, “cherished their camp job which was a sinecure with power.”[*]
One exception she cited was the case of a Ravensbrueck SS doctor Rolf
Rosenthal who performed an abortion on his nurse/ mistress Gerta Quernheim.
Rosenthal was sentenced to death but committed suicide before the sentence
could be carried out (Laska 265; Tillion 73). A report from the Russian
section of Auschwitz says that SS guards raped young, pretty, and healthy
girls “until they were half dead. From there they went to the ovens.” Father
Joseph Tyl testified that a “certain SS guard” who was a “pervert who killed
people for pleasure …was also a sex maniac who satisfied his lust with young
Jewish girls, whom he murdered immediately afterwards” (Aroneanu 30, 34). A
very early interview in a DP camp, 1946, revealed that German civilians and
soldiers, including SS, committed rape:

…all of
this [gynecological examinations] was perpetrated not just by the SS but
German foremen [civilians] as well. There was a German foreman by the name
of Krause, the most terrible in the factory. When Krause would go by, even
the machinery would run differently. Sometimes he would get drunk, pick a
few women and rape them, and later they were shot so that there be no “race
pollution.” There was a well known SS [officer who] did the same
thing.(Niewyk 221)

Felicia Karay also reported “known
cases of individual and collective rapes of Jewish women” by “German
commanders [who] were reluctant to deprive themselves of any of life’s
pleasures” even in forced labor camps. She cites “dozens of testimonies”
about officer Fritz Bartenschlager who chose “escort girls,” including five
whom he took to a party in his apartment where he ordered them to serve his
guests in the nude. They were raped by these same guests. A few months
later, at another party/orgy that included high ranking officers, such as
the SS commander of Radom, the guests raped and then murdered three other
Jewish women (Karay 290-91).

Though we might expect otherwise
because rape was a serious racial purity issue, rape happened, but was and,
to some extent, still is—ignored or neglected. Ruth Seifert argues that rape
and other abuses are another expression of male dominance: suppressing the
mention of rape reinforces the marginalization and diminution of women’s
importance (66-68). Indeed, a quick survey of the indexes of Holocaust
history books suggests that rape and sexuality are not a significant part of
the history.[1]One exception is The Holocaust Chronicle, which mentions the rape of
two Jewish teenagers in Warsaw in a Jewish cemetery by two German non
commissioned officers on February 18, 1940; and, on August 25, 1943, SS
troops at the Janowska labor camps forced 24 Jewish girls at an all night SS
orgy, and finally that “victims of sexual abuse have largely kept silent”
(191,474, 484).

Women’s silence about their
victimization is influenced primarily by cultural norms, the need to protect
oneself from painful memories, and a desire to restore one’s sense of
control over one’s person.[2]
Joan Ringelheim recognized women’s ambivalence to disclose sexual abuse as
“split memory,” or the difficulty of reconciling one’s personal memory with
the public, traditional versions of Holocaust history. Ringelheim wrote
about Pauline who was abused while she was in hiding and about Susan who was
unsuspecting in her willingness to accept bread by a Polish inmate in
Birkenau who expected sex for this bread. He raped her when she did not
submit to him willingly. Both women were reluctant to relate these incidents
and thereby challenge the master narrative of the Holocaust that doesn’t
include women’s sexual victimization. Moreover, said Ringelheim,
interviewers may be protecting themselves and avoiding discomfort by not
asking questions that would encourage the transmission of these stories
(Ringelheim 18-33).[3]

Recently, in woman to woman
interviews, we began to learn about rape in the ghettos and the camps, by
both German and Jewish men. We are also learning more about sex for
survival, for lack of a better term, which refers to trading sexual favors
in order to survive. Sex for survival is not consensual sex, but one can
argue that it is technically not violent. Far more frequently than they are
part of memoirs or interviews, rape and “sex for survival” are subjects of
film and fiction. In the absence of sufficient documentation, we may very
cautiously consider some of the fictional accounts as imaginary accounts or
aesthetic interpretations of historical occurrences. For example, see the
House of Dolls, The Kommandant’s Mistress, and White Hotel. We
see, in these and other works, narratives that reflect the commodification,
hence dehumanization, of women. (For obvious reasons, Holocaust films are,
more often than not, sexsational.)[4]

In a groundbreaking work, Roger
Smith analyzes the history and context of rape in genocide and demonstrated
the fact that rape is ubiquitous in warfare. Its purposes include exercising
control or dominance, rewarding soldiers, “destroying a group’s identity by
decimating cultural and social bonds,” “expulsion of entire ethnic groups”
(as in Bosnia-Herzegovina), imposing terror and humiliation, and, most
recently, as an instrument of war by proving the dominance of the men
rapists in the victor group over the men of the defeated group in that they
were not able to protect their women (Card 18). Smith found that the only
two instances in which rape was neither taken for granted nor used as a
strategy of war were the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide (13-15).
Although rape was not a policy of Nazi Germany, its close cousins, sexual
abuse and humiliation were part of policy. In fact, domination,
degradation, and commodification were just as prevalent in the sexual abuse
of Jewish women as it has been and still is in other cases of genocide.
Thus, an inherent cruel irony underlies the discussion of the rape of Jewish
women by Germans and, moreover, it takes no stretch of the imagination to
consider that a pervasive and persistent culture of patriarchy “permitted”
Jewish men to demand sex for food in ghettos and camps. Just as rape has
extensive physical and psychological repercussions for the woman, so does
sexual abuse in the form of sex for survival, though perhaps not as much.
And just as rape by a friend or relative results in a profound sense of
betrayal, so did abuse by a fellow Jew constitute an act of betrayal in the
minds of Jewish women. While their need for food was stronger and more
elemental than their need to protect their dignity, they were nevertheless
victimized and exploited by Jewish men. To be fair, at the same time, we
must recognize that women’s lack of awareness about their rights prior to
the human rights and women’s rights movements contributed to their
acceptance of a certain amount of exploitation. Clearly, in the ghettos and
camps, women’s status—or lack of status—“compounded their vulnerability to
violence” (Human Rights Global Watch Report).

In Nazi Germany, though, rape and
other forms of sexual violence were not crimes, not from the German point of
view nor, at that time, from an international perspective.[5]
From a Nazi perspective, the crime was rassenschande, not rape.
Ironically, any sexual involvement with a Jew was rassenschande, or
“race mixing.” Paragraph 2 of the Nuremberg Law, 1935, reads, “Extramarital
intercourse between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related
blood is forbidden” (Hochstadt 44). For the Nazi, Jewish women were
subhuman, thereby not subject to victimization of a punishable crime. Thus,
the act of rape was inconsequential; the act of rassenschande,
however, was a grave crime of race defilement and the perpetrator faced
punishment. Marion Kaplan reports that ultimately the “judiciary viewed
‘race defilement’ as seriously as ‘high treason.’” By 1939, the average
sentence was 4 to 5 years. Not surprisingly, Jewish men received harsher
treatment than Aryans (Kaplan 80). Raul Hilberg explains that the courts
gave no leniency in these cases and did not allow for mitigating
circumstances. He cites the case of Lehmann Katzenberger and Irene Seiler,
dramatized years later in the film, Judgment at Nuremberg.
Katzenberger, in his late sixties, was executed (45-46). Indeed, by 1945,
rassenschande was one of the 43 crimes punishable by death in the
Reich (Botwinick 104). However, the only rape case reported in a Croatian
concentration camp in 1941 and 1942 resulted in sentencing the rapist, a
German guard, to six months in prison for “desecration of the race”
(Lengel-Krizman 15).

What conclusions can we draw?

Rape of Jewish women by German men
was insignificant in the eyes of Germany’s judicial system. Jews, men and
women, were “life unworthy of living” so that no violent act against them
was problematic from a Nazi point of view. Rape was never state policy as it
later became in the former Yugoslavia, when it became an official weapon of
war. Indeed, genocidal rape was not declared a category of crime until after
Bosnia. Rape, as a weapon of war, was repeated in Rwanda, largely
unpunished. More recently, news reports from and about Darfur include
descriptions of women who are raped as punishment for their Blackness and
then are branded so that they carry the insult to their bodies and souls
publicly and irrevocably. According to the Human Rights Watch, “rape,
nonetheless, has long been mischaracterized and dismissed by military and
political leaders—those in a position to stop it—as a private crime, a
sexual act, the ignoble act of the occasional soldier; worse still, it has
been accepted precisely because it is so commonplace” (1).

Nevertheless, Jewish women were
raped by Jewish and non-Jewish men in ghettos and camps though evidence to
substantiate such occurrences is usually anecdotal. What has been
substantiated by sheer repetition in and concurrence of testimony is the
bartering of sex in ghettos, camps, and resistance groups – for food,
clothing, shelter, and protection. Sex exchanges, or sex for survival, at
the latrines in Birkenau cannot be judged by us, the scholars, or by anyone,
two generations removed. However, such sex smacks of sadism. Again, we
turn to the concept of gender and genocide and find that women are almost
always victimized in war and genocide because of their gender.[6]
In the Holocaust, Jews were victimized because they were Jews. But, also in
the Holocaust, Jewish men exploited the vulnerability of Jewish
women—perhaps not unforgivably but certainly unethically and unjustifiably
and in violation of a woman’s right to dignity. Perhaps such exploitation
was an extension of the dominance of men in “normal society.” If so, the
abundance of such occurrences speaks to a deep need to re-humanize society
so that it protects men and women equally and its most vulnerable members,
especially. Sexual abuse, including rape, in the contexts of both war and
peace, is a violation of human rights and needs to be addressed as such.
Furthermore, the shift from traditional warfare that, for the most part,
excluded women, to warfare that targets civilians demands a reassessment of
the conventions of war and a reinforcement of human rights, a process that
began with the Nuremberg Tribunal (Philipose 46-62). At the same time, the
congruence of the conventions of war and the laws protecting human rights
suggests that women and men need to be protective of each other and that
dominance of one sex over another diminishes the strength
and spirit of both.

[*]
Ravensbrueck Trial records indicate that there was a total of 35,000
women in the brothel system and that women assigned in such
brothels may have had to “accommodate” as many as 7 to 8 men a day.
[Back to essay]

Notes

[1]
For example, in the section on women, in Walter Laquer’s The
Holocaust Encyclopedia, there is no mention of rape or any other
type of sexual coercion. [Back to essay]

[3]
See also Engelking’s discussion of “bystander guilt,” a concept
introduced by Yael Danieli, History and Memory, 251. [Back to essay]

[4]
For gendered analyses of sexuality in Holocaust novels and films,
see S. Lillian Kremer, “Women in the Holocaust: Representation of
Gendered Suffering and Coping Strategies in American Fiction,” and
Rebecca Scherr, “The Uses of Memory and Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality
in Holocaust Film, Fiction, and Memoir.” [Back to essay]

[5]
Rape and forced pregnancies are included in the UN Definition of
genocide and thus crimes that can be tried. Humiliation per se is
not. [Back to essay]

[6]
Roger Smith. “Genocide and the Politics of Rape.” The exceptions,
cited by Smith, are women guards hired by the SS and women
perpetrators in the Khmer Rouge. [Back to essay]

Copelon, Rhonda. “Surfacing Gender:
Reconceptualizing Crimes Against Women in Time of War.” Mass
Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ed. Alexandra
Stiglmayer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. 197-218.

Schwartz, Helen. “Personal
Reflections,” Parts III and IV. Estimates of rapes in Berlin alone
after the war run from 110,000 to 900,000.
www.womenandtheholocaust.com.

Seifert, Ruth. “War and Rape: A
Preliminary Analysis.” Mass Rape: The War against Women in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994. 54-72.

Smith, Roger. “Genocide and the
Politics of Rape: Historical and Psychological Perspectives.” Paper
presented at Remembering for the Future, International Conference on
the Holocaust and Genocide, 13-17 March 1994. Berlin.

Tec, Nechama. Resilience and
Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003.